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One Per Cent

Counting the kills

(Image: Robin Loznak/Corbis)

App takes sweat out of roadkill watch

Around 1 million animals are killed by cars each day in the US, making it difficult to keep track. A new app could help. Daniel Olson, a wildlife biologist at Utah State University, recruited around 50 state employees to test the app. For one year, the contractors conducted twice-weekly patrols over 1700 miles. They recorded nearly 7000 animals. The app reduced the normal 10 per cent data-entry error rate to virtually zero (PLoS One, doi.org/s5c), while location errors dropped by 99 per cent. It also saved around 150 hours of work.

“We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet”The CIA issued this humorous tweet to announce that it had joined Twitter last week. Not everyone was amused. Later that day, The New York Review of Books began a series of tweets detailing the agency’s controversial interrogation techniques

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Behind that chatbot Turing ‘success’

So did he or didn’t he? This week we were told that a chatbot – Eugene Goostman – had passed Alan Turing’s test by fooling more than 30 per cent of human judges at the Royal Society in London into thinking it was human. But it is not as clear-cut as it seems. For instance, the same bot hit 29 per cent two years ago. And as early as 1991, a different chatbot hit the 50 per cent mark. Also, Eugene is said to be a 13-year-old, non-native, English speaker – a way of making the task easier.

Is anyone bigger than Jesus and Hitler?

Step aside Jesus, Hitler and Aristotle. Turns out Carl Linnaeus, the inventor of the scientific naming scheme for plants and animals, is the most influential person in history. Young-Ho Eom of the University of Toulouse, France, used the Google PageRank algorithm, which scores websites according to their influence, to create a list of the most important people based on links within Wikipedia articles across 24 languages. An alternative algorithm named Adolf Hitler, Michael Jackson and Madonna as the top three.